Nobler Things
by SilverLocke980
Summary: As Zell awaits, in a small bed with Selphie, for the first band of heroes to come and dismantle his doomsday device, he thinks on what he is doing and smiles... as Rinoa participates in the rebirth of the Sorceresses into the world. One-shot.


Hello, and welcome, all. I am Silverlocke980, who a few of you may know from "Murderous Thoughts"… but, if any of you know me at all, it is most likely from "Harry's Madness" and not some other, less explicable source. Regardless, I welcome one and all.

This is something I came up with when playing the game and finding myself- weirdly, inexplicably- feeling bad for the Sorceress. How had she come to be in her castle? What would drive her to actually go back into the past and change the future? What in the world could she have done, to call herself "Ultimecia", a name that, though patently false, does ring of power and time and might untold?

What could do this to her? And is it something we should respect?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my answer. It's wrapped up in Zell, and Selphie- those two lovers are part of the glue that binds this all together- but in the end, this story is about Ultimecia, and how, in her final quest, she was able to save the world.

Actually, now that I think about it, she was able to do something better. She was able to save a _people_.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I now present to you my story. It's a love wrapped in a tragedy covered by the blinding beauty of hope. And now, readers, it's…

"SHOWTIME!"

Final Fantasy VIII

**Nobler Things**

I'd love to tell you that Selphie was perfectly happy with Irvine Kinneas. And I'd equally love to tell you that Irvine, poor old Irvine, kept his cowboy-sophomore-weakling appreciation for girls and went out and screwed around on her. And I'd love to tell you that it broke Selphie's heart, and I comforted her.

But for all that to happen, she had to have been with Irvine in the first place. And as completely idiotic as it looks, standing as I do from here, almost above all the things we did and fought through, she never was.

I know what you're thinking. " Bullshit. She was with him all the time." And in a sense, you'd be right. When she was piloting the bright-red, fancy dragon spaceship from hell (might I add, I think that country gave it to her later, as a gift, almost), who was behind her? Irvine. Who was the first person to heal her if she needed it in battle? Irvine. Who was always using his gun as a sort of mobile wall, pushing monsters back until Selphie could whip out her nunchuka and send the monster to an early, painful grave? Irvine.

But…

What you don't consider is that Irvine was never really the type to stay with anyone, even for the time it would take simply to know them, much less love them, and worse, you are not considering the fact that Time Compression affected us all. There are certain things no one should have to go through- and Time Compression is one of them. I think part of it wasn't the compression itself, just the… sorceress' themselves. I have a hard time saying that lately; after all I've been through, I feel more sorry for the sorceress' themselves than I do for anyone they harmed. After all, haven't we been hunting them for centuries? When all is said and done, I'd almost rather go back and let us suffer. I've… lost a lot of my thinking that the "adults" of this world are holy. I'd almost rather consider the fact that I am holy, especially considering what I've done.

You don't go save the world without getting a little power from it. For my part, I am now considered the greatest martial artist who ever lived, and I may well prove it- up until the last few months (around the time I completed my "Doomsday Device" and Squall's plan kicked into high gear) people came from all over to see the amazing warrior Zell, all of them in amazement over my desert-tanned (read: wind-burned and sun-burned) body and the strangely chlorine tint of my hair (dyed that way by the endless desert sun), amazed even more by the fierce glint in my eyes that belied the stories of my general stupidity and rock-hard denseness. That last is probably the reason I get- excuse me, _was_- challenged so much. I've beaten more enemies than they can imagine, and yet a few think they can still claim top title as a martial artist and beat me.

It's never all that hard to beat them. One of them actually managed to stand up to a single punch from me, but since I always punch in doubles, that didn't help him much.

Knock knock. Rocks in the brain. Pound pound pound. Beat on them once, and they go down.

Heh. That rhymed. I'll end up sounding like Squall now- he's off, somewhere, writing stories in an attempt to be more like his father. The crazy thing is, Squall has developed a marked taste for poetry, and he's actually not half bad. Rinoa likes it- she still thinks of him as her holy knight, but things got real sober on that end of the relationship when Squall asked Rinoa to make him her official Sorceress' Knight. I wasn't worried that he'd go and pull a Seifer on us, but I know that all of us were real quiet when the ceremony took place. Rinoa took out Squall's sword as a sort of symbol of their bond- and let me tell you, when it came to a weapon with symbolism, Lionheart is right up there with Excalibur (hell, all our weapons are up there with that fabled old holy sword, really), because there wasn't much more you could do with something then make it a symbol of those who saved the world- and performed a very Sorceress tradition of cutting her hair and forming it in a lock, wrapping it about Squall's gunblade handle as a sort of sign of their bond, and then Squall kissed both her hands as she gave the sword back to him, and then the ceremony was complete. We were worried that the press might take it wrong, but they instead glorified the "rebirth of good traditions within the Sorceress community".

Yeah. Right. Like there is a Sorceress community left anymore. Me and my friends killed them all. The only Sorceress left is Rinoa. She has, however…

Best not to talk about that. The ones that will be called Barons and Duchesses in the future (one of the many plans we have come up with) are not the discussion here… though I'll explain that later.

Back to the main subject.

I live alone now- relatively, anyway- and I'm never very far from home. Home being, of course, Fuller's Build- a little, no-nonsense town built in the middle of the great big desert Galbadia's former prison called home. Galbadia's army is rather quiet nowadays, of course- after the staggering defeat we gave them, Galbadia promptly withdrew its forces from the surrounding towns, concentrating them on its capital and nervously awaited the day we'd come to kill them (we never did that, oddly, and don't plan on it)- and so I have nothing to deal with except the occasional wandering monster... and the wanna-be heroes that are coming to prey on poor old mad Zell.

Heh. I guess Squall's plan for me to act as a distraction are going great. Half of the people after me even believe the whole "Doomsday Device" thing. It's really just an impressive-looking collection of pipes and organs in my back yard. To the people trying to kill me, it's called Nautilus. Me and my friends call it "Sparky".

Damn. I wanted to get to the main subject and I've yet to reach it. Oh well. Back to work...

Irvine never told anyone this, but the part he always liked best about himself was the part of him that awoke whenever he got behind a gun. Irvine has always wielded a gun, and in this world where the laws of para-magic mean that few people actually can wield a gun (I've heard it said that something like 90 of the world cannot wield a gun; those who can't always feel sick whenever they touch one, and it forces them to choose another, less high-tech weapon, like fists or whips), that's rare talent enough; but Irvine was always more than that, and he was a sniper. That last is important, I think; important to why Selphie is here with me now, and not with Irvine.

I did mention that, right? That Selphie happens to be asleep next to me, wondering when the first "save the world" crew will get here? And that we're both...

Ah, skip that. You don't need to hear the details. Probably don't want to, anyway. Might be kind of bad for the digestion system.

Besides, we're all sticks and bones anyway- not much on us to fantasize about. I'm probably the softer one of us two- and that's not saying much. I break rocks with my bare hands, after all.

Anyway, Irvine loved the quiet that came when he was behind a gun; for a while there, he got scared of it, and filled the silence with girls and one-night stands, but in the end, he went back to it, and there he stayed. Irvine's up in Trabia now, waiting in the snowy wastes, hiding near the entrance to the village ol' Nooj came from (before we killed him, anyway), where the first of Rinoa's bastard children sleep. He's got Exeter with him, and God help any wanna-be SeeD candidate who thinks that they have to go kill the dark sorceress living in their village. Irvine will riddle their body with bullets and leave it to the wolves.

Or whatever random creatures roam there. Trabia's strange. No matter how many times I visit it, it never makes sense. Creatures there developed differently from those in this desert; instead of resorting to biological means to defend themselves from the hostility of their environment, they used magic. The result is the most messed-up ecosystem in the entire world, held together only by the sheer force of will of some of the animals there. Irvine himself has said that he's had to learn more magic- and more ways to use it- living there for the past few months than he's had to in all the days we journeyed together. I wished him the best of luck when I heard that.

Not that he'll need it. We're all blessed, kind of; I don't think we could fail now if we tried. For some reason, Fate seems to be protecting us.

Awful kind of it, considering all the screwing around we did with it. Time travel, Time Compression, time change...

Selphie tried to stay with Irvine, but it never worked out. Time Compression brought out the best in us. For me, Time Compression and the hell it brought taught me that what I had believed in was right, no matter what the cost, and that made me change; it's strange to think about it now, but it was Time Compression's effect of making me believe in my own beliefs that freed my mind to think of bigger and more expansive things. With my own beliefs verified, I could concentrate on other things. Henceforth, all this- including the notebook I'm writing in.

Time Compression effected us all differently (Squall, for instance, became a better man; his beliefs, already verified in his mind, simply became fiercer, and he gained a want to force the world to bow to his beliefs, instead of keeping them all inside like he always did), but in Irvine, it made him realize that the quiet was all he'd ever really wanted in life. In Ultimecia's castle, we spent a lot of time just walking, journeying down empty hallways that still felt as if a thousand half-dead ghosts were floating around and around and smiling at you, smiling at you because they were insane and they fucking knew it; me and Squall, of all people, filled the air of our little group, but Quistis told us later that in her group, Irvine never spoke. Not at all. Even when he got attacked in combat, he never spoke a word. And his aim was never better than it was in those fights. Quistis herself told me that he was actually a little scary; like he was no longer man, but machine. No longer human, but a perfect killing weapon.

Whew. Gave me shivers just thinking about it. Castle Ultimecia was bad. Between the idiotic puzzles and the various monsters she threw at us, Ultimecia herself was quite a trip. Evil bitch, that one.

Hopefully, we can change that future.

Irvine finally told Selphie, about five months after we got back, that he couldn't deal with her anymore; that, though he loved her, he could not _love_ her, and that he was so sorry for it, but Time Compression had shown him his own face and it was that of a sniper, not a cowboy. He'd ditched the hat some time ago; from what I hear now, he still sports the trenchcoat, but instead of a hat, he wears a rag that pulls his hair back. He also has one over his mouth so the snow doesn't get in. He still wears cowboy boots, though. Never figured out how that went with not being a cowboy anymore. I thought the boots were always part of that deal.

Slippers, now, _that's_ a different story. Silent and comfortable. I always figured every sniper would have some.

Anywhoo, Selphie actually didn't cry that much when he told her- a lot of her romantic side having left her in Ultimecia's Castle, I'd warrant, though for some reason it made her a lot more sensitive to other people and their feelings- and when he left her to head for Esthar (his destination at the time; it was where he'd meet up with Squall and there find out about the grand plan), she began a journey around the world. She traveled everywhere, and when she finally had to go home, she came here.

And, well...

There was the love. I guess it was always there- a kind of "I'm comfortable with you, I deal well with you, I'm okay with you" that we never really lost and always kept a hold of, even when we left the orphanage for so long- but we'd never acknowledged it. And about two days after she came here?

Yeah. There you go. That puts you up to here (one month from the time she arrived). And now, my side-story about Selphie out of the way, I guess I'd better write down the grand plan, since you all are probably _dying_ to know.

(Heh heh. Always did love to say that. Now that I'm " The Bad Guy", I'll probably be saying that a lot more now. Maybe I should lay on the cheese. I always loved to see a bad guy with cheese- Biggs and Wedge immediately coming to mind.)

The crazy part about all this is that it was Squall's idea. Squall, who had spent his entire life in subconscious training for this moment, who had bloody went back in time to tell Cid and Edea to train him to kill Sorceresses, who had actually forced his own fate on himself... Squall was the one who came up with this idea. And it has been Squall who's made it happen.

The idea is staggering, complex, and probably unreal. But the dream is beautiful. So yeah, for that, I'll fight.

Rinoa and Squall, using Squall's new job as "roving reporter" for cover, will travel around the world and find as many "Sorceress-likely" candidates as possible. Actually, that's not too hard- Rinoa has figured out how to make even un-usable candidates for Sorceressization powerful, competent adepts- but the fun part is not doing that.

The fun part comes after.

Rinoa and Squall are rounding up as many "special" children from orphanages around the world as they can and sticking them on the Ragnorak. From there, Quistis- who's driving it- takes them to a variety of "safe places" around the world. One's in Trabia, where Irvine's standing guard. One's down here, in Galbadia, where I used to have the job- before I became "Mr. Bad Guy", anyway- and the last is in Esthar, where we've managed to use Esthar's own shielding technology against it, creating a safe place we call "Lighthouse". It's completely invisible to the outside world. My knowledge of mechanics is (unfortunately for the world) even better than Esthar's.

The ones we train won't be called Sorceresses, of course. That's just a quick way to make the whole damn world hate them. We've decided on "Barons" and "Duchesses"... it makes them sound kind of noble, somehow, and we doubt many people will mess with that. It also fits with those poor Sorceresses we met in Time Compression, when they wore those long flowing robes. Poor girls. I still dream about the eighteen-year-old I killed. She was just a kid… just a child. And still I put my fist right through her stomach. All the way through. And then I listened to her scream. But…

Oh man, that's why we're fucking _doing _this. The Sorceresses we fought- they were just kids! And they weren't even "kids" our age, I mean... some of them were just terrified little girls. They were children, forced to fight for their lives, forced to use powers that probably terrified them as much as they did anybody just to keep some stinking fool with a breath of whiskey on his tongue from killing them simply for being who they were. And when one of them, probably the saddest one of them, one so bloody sad she couldn't even _talk_ right and had a _lisp_, came up with an idea to ruin everything once and for all, they actually ran to her to help… because that ending was more preferable than the world they had been born into. And when someone cried in the night, and they heard, and someone wanted to answer?… Well, they never had anyone to help them, either, so tough luck, kid.

Maybe that's why they did it. They no longer cared. They were dead already- dead and gone. Dead to the world, dead to the life, dead to the faith that keeps us going. So…

Why should they care about destroying the world? They were already dead; let someone else be dead. They were tired of it. Let someone else play the pauper for once. Let someone else suffer.

It is for the memory of all those dead that I am so determined to let these children live again. For every Sorceress I killed, for every Sorceress born dead because the world denied her life, I want fifteen more to live. And for every Sorceress that lives, I want a thousand to be born.

And I want to give them hope again…

You may have wondered why I have mentioned "children" several times and not said "girls" even once. You know why? Heh heh. Because they're not _all_ female...

We never ended up deciding the children should be Sorceresses. Instead, we came up with a better idea. Why should they be called Sorceresses? That brings up different problems. But if you give them a different name, say, one inspired by a few Sorceresses we had to kill, like Baron or Duchess...

We've figured out how to give men the Sorceress power. Turns out that it's been done before- of all people, Dr. Odine's great-grandfather had been a Sorceress, which was why that family has always been so good with magic- but men with this power have always hidden it, instead of showing the world like so many Sorceresses do. Also, Adel's teacher- the woman who gave her the power- had announced, some 300 years ago, that men were no longer to be considered as candidates. From what I've heard, she was a major man-hater who thought they were all bastards. Don't know why. Personally, I don't think anything- murder, death, rape, robbery, anything- is worth hating an entire group for. It's always the individual who is at fault, not their gender or racial status. Just look at me- I've saved a world and have perfect respect for women, yet I'm male. Personally, I always thought bodily differences were vastly overrated.

Back to the plan...

Anyway, Rinoa and Squall are out there now, finding them. Using a rotating schedule to keep up with them, Quistis is teaching them- who else, eh? In Quistis, Time Compression evoked a realization that teaching was her true job, and that belief, combined with her natural ability, has resulted in a fine woman to instruct the Barons and Duchesses of the future- and Irvine is there, too, guarding them. Selphie will guard them, too, here, with me. She'll protect the town of Fuller's Build, and let the children grow. As for me?

I'm the distraction. And man, do I love the distraction. See, all the people of the world might get awful worried that somebody is flitting around in the Ragnarok and just picking up children in orphanages. And an awful lot of people don't like the fact that there is even _one_ Sorceress left alive, even if she did save the world. (Half of them, might I add, don't believe that; they think Squall lets her live because he loves her. One of them even told him that herself. Squall promptly tried to kill her- and almost succeeded, too.) So...

Why let them worry about my friends when they can worry about me? Nobody thought much of me anyway, so I've got a beautiful cover story. Poor, little, unrespected Zell, out in the middle of the desert with no one to listen to except the wind and whatever random chimes might be hanging around out there, happens to go just a little crazy one day and build a doomsday device. And the entire world pits its resources against this dangerous madman and his strange desire to get the respect he feels he deserves.

Man. I get tears in my eyes writing that. So, while everyone in the world tries to destroy "Nautilus" (Hah! Nautilus! Man, I don't even know where I came up with that, but it seems like a good word, somehow... like it talks of oceans and submarines and deep things and secrets, somehow, all at once, a good word like that somehow), Squall and Rinoa busily flit off and find the children. And when they are done and the diversion is not longer needed...

I will "die", destroyed in one last horrific, terrible battle against some random group of wanderers, stricken down in battle. And when I go, and Nautilus is dismantled (explodes, actually; it's rigged so that, if I push a button in my coat, it will create a sandstorm that makes it _look_ like it's exploding; because of that, the "heroes" will run off, thinking I'm dead and caught in the explosion of my own doomsday device, and then I'll turn my machine off, get up, dust myself off, and leave), the world will celebrate its "new heroes", and walk on. And then?

I go to Fuller's Build, have Squall perform the wedding ceremony (she asked me to marry her yesterday, after what may have been our first kiss; I said yes, though I've no idea how all that will work out), and then me and my wife spend our time busily raising our kids. It'll be tough, I know, but what with all the equipment we've lugged out here and my mechanical know-how, we should be okay. We're rich, after all.

Saving the world does have its benefits. A full bank account is one of them. I think half the world gave us cash when the time came. Craziness.

We'll never tell anyone- not Cid (especially not him! Heavens no, the man would freak), not Edea, not even Laguna (though I think he suspects, and maybe approves- it would be his style, after all, all crazy and nuts, figuring it out as he goes along, flying by the seat of his pants, swinging from a vine, wiggling his eyebrows crazily at everyone he meets as his two friends struggle to keep up behind him)- and I don't think we ever will. Until the Barons and Duchesses step out into the world years later (at some point when a crisis is met- and hey, who knows, maybe I'll make my comeback stand then? Old Sparky is too good of an idea not to use more than once, and we do need a villain after all) and save it, no one will ever know. And I...

I think it's right, this way. It's sneaky and it's lowdown and it's a damn dirty trick... but I like it, all the same. And you know what?

It's holy. Not in the sense that I am holy, or in the sense that I _think_ I am holy... but holy like heaven. Yeah, that's what I think.

Somehow, I believe, if there is a God, He approves of this plan. And He knows that I desperately, desperately want it to succeed.

Six of us against the world. All of us making a stand. This was always the way it was... but this time, there is a difference.

We are making _our_ stand now. And no one, not Cid, Edea, Galbadia, Esthar, or SeeD are going to stand in our way.

I nuzzle Selphie with my nose, and I am content. This is what I've always wanted.

Love beside me. A goal before me. And somewhere...

A little girl, maybe? Someone who just wants to be held in the middle of the night and told it's okay, it's alright, I'm here beside you and you won't fail? Somewhere, maybe, is there a little girl who will grow up with a lisp that makes her say "C" "K" and pronounce Compression "Kompression?"

Is she out there somewhere? And most of all, can we save her?

Because, in the end…

I think I'm doing this for her.

God grant that that little child comes home, and that someone be waiting there for her. Because that is the kind of man I so desperately want to be.

_This was found in Zell's former house over a hundred years after his death at the ripe old age of eighty-five. The scattered peoples of the Barons and Duchesses around the world found it, and this memento has become one of the most read pieces of literature on the planet. It has been posthumously titled "Thoughts of a Hero" and is used as training in all the major Baron/Duchess villages around the planet._

_Rinoa and Squall succeeded in their quest to make Sorceresses people who could live in the world again- thirty years after this was written, a strange Guardian Force called Atomos began terrorizing the world. With their combined powers, the Barons and Duchesses managed to appear and destroy it. Zell, though disgruntled somewhat by his apparent loss of a chance to play the "Bad Guy" again, was soon comforted by his wife, Selphie, who reminded him that now their three children- all gifted by Rinoa with magic- could be heroes too. On that day, all the friends met up again. It was one of their last gatherings together. From what few records exist of the day, it was one of the greatest moments of their lives. Afterwards, they all changed their names to hide their involvement with the Barons and promptly stepped back into public view as "friends" of the Barons and Duchesses. They would have used their real names, but since they really _had_ orchestrated all this, it would have made things… uncomfortable. Still, none of them much cared. Squall named himself Hart- Rinoa called herself Leona. Selphie took the name _

_Quistis eventually became known as "Teacher" to all the Barons and Duchesses, and after the name change to hide her old identity (she named herself "Angela" after Rinoa's by then dead dog), she started a new school she named as a "Haven". These Havens eventually replaced the Gardens, which for some reason all the heroes wanted to shut down. Cid, who was eventually told that the Gardens had to be removed, finally complied and turned them over to the heroes, who promptly took them down, stole all the technology, and reformatted the Havens with them. Quistis, who finally married Irvine (but that was odd; they both agreed that their seed should live on, but neither of them were made to love... but they were bound as tightly as friends ever were, and so it was natural that, though they did not love each other, they should at least give that gift to each other, the gift of life and the future), had two children, both of them beautiful baby girls, who were gifted by Rinoa since birth to have Sorceress abilities. She lived out her days happily. Her weapon passed down to her eldest daughter, who took it up with great passion. The second child, who always liked Daddy's guns, received Exeter._

_Irvine spent most of his time quietly guarding the Barons and Duchesses and was almost always the one they turned to when they needed help dealing with a problem. His strange, quiet visage was unsettling, but it always brought hope to the scattered communities of the Sorceresses worldwide. Irvine died at the age of eighty, the youngest of the group. Quistis herself died a year later, on the exact same day._

_Come to think of it, _all_ the heroes died on the exact same day… and maybe in the exact same hour. On the day after the anniversary of their defeat of Ultimecia, each hero was found dead… as if they had fought through that night again, and had lived only long enough afterwards to see the dawn rise up in their slow, bleeding vision. Maybe… that was their gift._

_Maybe._

_Rinoa and Squall had two kids, one boy, one girl, and both of them were extremely powerful Sorceresses. In an odd role-reversal, it was the girl who received Squall's blade, and the boy who preferred Mother's Blaster Edges. The two became famous leaders in their time. Rinoa and Squall stayed happily married until they died- and the world mourned the passing of the "last" Sorceress, which they thought she was, and turned its attention back on the mysterious Barons and Duchesses, those saviors of the world who had stepped into it in its time of need and rescued it. The world never did stop its love affair with the Barons. Squall would have been pleased._

_Zell and Selphie stayed together to the end of their days, and their three children- probably the oddest story of all- were the greatest of the seven. One received his father's gloves; the second his mother's nunchaku; and the girl received something more._

_She received her mother's somehow innate knowledge of magic and her father's technical know-how and became the most powerful Duchess of her time. She was revered as the "Queen" of the Duchesses and Barons, and ruled for a long time._

_When the world finally found out, they found they no longer cared. So in the end, the final quest of the great heroes- a quest that was, somehow, more noble than their first- was finished._

_And as for Ultimecia?_

_I think we all know the answer to Zell's last question._

_And maybe that was the point the entire time. _

_-_Lecture given by Quistis' great-grand-daughter, named Julia, after someone Quistis' daughter had heard her mother speak of, in tones of great sadness and loss.

Unbeknownst to her, a young girl named Kralla, who was slightly made fun of in class for her strange way of pronouncing "C" as "K", actually shivered when she heard about Ultimecia, but she never understood why she did that and ignored it for the rest of her days. She was soon discovered to be one of the most powerful Sorceresses who had ever lived (maybe _the_ most powerful), and she eventually grew to be known as one of the kindest Duchesses alive.

I've heard it said that when she died, all the people in the town where she lived heard bright, full laughter coming from her house, laughter from six throats. And when the townspeople went to investigate, they found her old, dead, with a smile on her face, and a small pile of objects on the floor near her small bed.

The pile included one glove (obviously made for fighting), a pair of glasses, a piece of a yellow shirt, a piece of a spent shell, and a strangely beautiful painting with an angle wing motif. And, underneath it all, one small thing.

It was a necklace with a growling lion on the front. And on the back, etched in print almost too fine to see, were these words.

" My final mission. Signed, Squall Leonheart, AKA Hart Storm."

I hear a lot of laughter in the voice that said that.

The End


End file.
